Deadline extended: The deadline set by militants holding an Australian engineer hostage in Iraq has been extended, Australia's top Islamic leader said today after meeting with senior Muslim clerics in the war-torn country. Douglas Wood, who lives with his wife in the San Francisco suburb of Alamo, was seized more than a week ago by Iraqi militants who have demanded that Australia pull its troops out of Iraq. The militants gave a 72-hour deadline that expired early Tuesday, but did not say what would happen if their demands were not met. Australia has refused to withdraw its forces. Australia's top Islamic leader, Sheik Taj El Din Al Hilaly, traveled to Baghdad yesterday to try to secure Wood's release.

Reprimand: The Army reprimanded and fined a colonel who was in charge of an intelligence unit at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq during the period of prisoner abuse, but the service chose not to press criminal charges, an official said yesterday. Col. Thomas M. Pappas, commander of the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade, based in Germany, had faced the possibility of criminal prosecution under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, but a two-star general instead administered what the military calls nonjudicial punishment. Pappas is among the highest-ranking officers whose actions have been scrutinized in the abuse scandal. Only one general, Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, has been punished.

War crimes: Kuwaiti prosecutors have drawn up a list of charges against ousted Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein and hundreds of his officials for alleged war crimes committed during Iraq's occupation of the Gulf nation, the prosecutor general said yesterday. The list will be delivered to the Iraqi court that will try Hussein and other former regime members, and the new charges will be added to the existing allegations, prosecutor general Hamed al-Othman said, according to the state-owned Kuwait News Agency. Hussein already faces charges in Iraq that include killing rival politicians, gassing Kurds, invading Kuwait and suppressing Kurdish and Shiite uprisings in 1991 after the U.S.-led Gulf War that liberated Kuwait.